The present invention concerns systems, methods and devices for gathering data concerning media usage by predetermined audience members.
Estimates of media usage are an important tool employed by advertisers. In addition to information of the numbers of audience members receiving media from a given station, channel or source and the days and times such media was received, advertisers would like to know where the audience members were when exposed to the media.
It has been proposed to distribute audio media having identification codes for use in identifying the persons who received the media and the times of receipt. This would be accomplished by receiving the encoded audio media using a monitor permanently located at each media receiving device, separating the identification codes in the permanently located monitor and wirelessly transmitting the separated identification codes from the permanently located monitor to a portable signal detector unit carried by an audience member. The portable unit would then detect the codes from the transmission and store them for subsequent use in producing audience estimates.
The proposal includes generating a local identification code in the permanently located monitor at each receiver, adding this further code to the wireless transmission and receiving the further code in the portable signal detector. The received further code would then be used to identify the audience member's location at the receiver at a given time.
The proposed technique is cumbersome and expensive, since it requires the use of monitors permanently located at each receiver to pick up the audio signal and separate the identification codes from it. Then, after transmission, the identification codes must be detected in the portable signal detector. Consequently, relatively complex and expensive monitoring devices must be deployed at each receiver. Such monitoring devices must also be arranged to pick up the audio produced by the receiver, which requires either an electrical connection to the receiver or the use of a microphone permanently positioned on or very close to a speaker of the receiver.